The Blessings of the Animals_A Novel

CHAPTER Thirty-Four

I TOOK ZUZU HOME WITH ME, SINCE IT WAS THE WEEKEND. That would save me twenty-minute, one-way drives to check on her. I hooked her IV bag to a wire cage in my kitchen, gave her another pain injection, and sat with her most of the evening. She’d groggily lift her head, snorting a sound of surprise as if to say, “What happened?” then fall asleep again.
Gerald sat in my lap as I leaned against the kitchen island with a glass of wine to call Gabby at her tournament. “Dad said you kicked ass, Mom! He said you were absolutely killer. You saved her life.”
I stroked Gerald’s smooth chest and shoulder—exactly where we’d have to amputate Zuzu’s leg if her foot didn’t circulate.
I reached into the cage to feel that paw even though I knew it was too soon to tell.
IN THE MORNING, ZUZU’S FOOT FELT WARM—NOT HOT—but was swollen enough for me to know we weren’t out of the woods yet.
I was still unsettled by all I’d learned during that emergency yesterday. Shouldn’t I be happy to know Zayna and Bobby would fall apart? The knowledge nagged at me, though, rather than bringing any satisfaction.
Although there was nothing really to do for the puppy but wait, I contemplated using Zuzu as an excuse to get out of visiting yet another bakery with Olive. This would be our fifth trip to sample cakes. I didn’t know why she was doing this when everyone knew a David’s Hot Buns cake was the only way to go.
Fortunately Helen called to offer me a rescue as a legitimate excuse. “Outright abuse,” she said, sounding livid. “We need to take your trailer.”
I looked out the window. “But it’s not raining.”
After I’d carried Zuzu outside to use the bathroom, I shut her back in the cage to keep her contained. I called Olive while Helen drove us to the rescue.
“I guess I’ll just go by my f*cking self,” she snapped.
“Why doesn’t Nick go with you?”
“He’s no help. I swear, we were screaming at each other last night. He says I have to cut at least fifty people from my guest list. There’s no way! This is my party, dammit.”
When I hung up, I said to Helen, “I don’t know if I’m gonna survive this wedding.”
I didn’t need to explain at all. Helen said, “What did Bride Olive do with Sane Olive?”
“And when did I become slave of honor?”
By the time we pulled up to a grungy little ramshackle house, raindrops splattered on the truck’s windshield.
“Of course,” Helen muttered. “You’re a jinx.”
“How do you know it’s me?”
We didn’t laugh. The circumstances had us too pissed off. “There she is,” Helen pointed.
A donkey—a miniature donkey—stood seething in a mud pit of a yard. A huge black band around one leg chained her to a cement chunk that looked like an old post-hole filler. A choke chain behind her jaw, at the top of her throat, tethered her to a tractor tire.
Helen looked at her phone report. “Mr. Pete Early. Lives alone.”
“I can see why.” Three feral cats lurked around his dilapidated front porch. A Batman sheet hung in the front window. Plastic sheeting rattled in the cold wind where it had come untacked.
We checked the donkey first. Thank God I’d put on my Wellingtons, because the mud went well past my ankles, threatening to steal my boots with every step. Helen stayed on the gravel driveway after the mud sucked off one of her shoes.
“Call the sheriff,” I said. “We’re taking this girl right now.”
Helen nodded and opened her phone.
I’d never worked with donkeys before the Blessing of the Animals. This one seemed a different breed, much smaller than Jenny and Jack in Manhattan, but, oh, this poor girl was sorely in need of a blessing. She was mired mid-shin in the mud. A huge tuft of puffy gray hairs on her forehead gave her a Neanderthal-ish ridge that shaded her eyes, and enormous ears rose toward me, looking like creatures of their own. She watched me approach with lined-black Cleopatra eyes. When I reached out to her, she cringed her face away, eyes shut.
“No, sweetie, I won’t hurt you,” I said, my throat closing. “I won’t ever.”
The neighbor woman across the road had called the Humane Society. The donkey had escaped from Mr. Early’s yard—smart girl—and hid in the woman’s garage. When the neighbor called Mr. Early, he’d arrived with a baseball bat and hit the donkey repeatedly on the back, neck, and even her face. The neighbor woman said she wished she’d never called him.
“C’mere, darling,” I said, offering the donkey an apple. She wouldn’t take it. I pushed back her hair to get a look at her swollen and crusted right eye. I gingerly felt around her face, finding several spots that made her flinch but nothing that appeared to be broken.
I felt down her neck and withers. She was thin but not starving, like Moonshot had been. Her shape, though, was odd—as though all her muscle and fat had succumbed to gravity and melted off her sides into a big, round belly. When I felt her belly, she turned her neck and nipped at me, swishing her thin tail with its tuft of black.
“Sorry, sweetie. Are you sore?” I offered her the apple again. She turned her head away with a “hmmph” but then swiftly turned back and took it from me.
“See if anyone’s home,” I called to Helen. She went to the porch and knocked, sending the skinny, wormy cats scattering. Nothing.
Just then a buzzing came from the woods behind the house, growing louder and louder, sounding like power tools. The donkey made one single bray, clearly of disgust, and laid her ears flat on her fuzzy neck. Three men on four-wheelers came into view. They drove into the yard, right up to me, showering me and the donkey with mud. All three men laughed as they cut their engines.
I wiped mud from my face. “Are you Mr. Pete Early?” I asked the skinny one, not giving them the satisfaction of getting a rise out of me with the mud.
“What’s it to you?”
“We’re here from the Humane Society, investigating a report of abuse.”
“What the hell?” another man—heavily tattooed—asked.
Pete Early’s grin vanished. “What I do with my animals is nobody’s damn business.”
“Oh, so you have more animals than this donkey, sir?”
I saw him notice Helen in the driveway. He began to dig at the skin of his neck.
“So what if I did?” Pete Early said.
“We’d like to see those animals, too, sir.”
“What if I don’t want to show you? You can’t come on my property without permission.”
“You’re absolutely right, sir,” Helen said, both of us so utterly polite it cracked me up. “We could get a warrant, though, and return with the police.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” he muttered.
The tattooed man whispered something to him.
I interrupted them. “Can you please show me where this donkey eats and drinks?” I asked. “There appears to be no water within reach of her . . . restraints here. And there’s no shelter.”
Speaking of no shelter, the rain, of course, had moved from droplets to a trickle.
“It’s a donkey,” he said, the way one might say, “It’s a rock.” “I don’t even want it. I took it as a favor to a friend, and now it’s coming back on me. I never hurt this damn donkey.”
“Did someone suggest you had?”
He looked confused, then angry. “You know what? You care about this donkey so much, she’s yours, okay? Take her. She’s a pain in my ass anyway.”
I smiled sweetly. “Thank you, sir. We’d be happy to take her off your hands.”
“We just need you to sign here,” Helen said, “and one of your friends, too, so it’s officially witnessed that we took the animal with your permission.”
“Jesus Christ on a crutch!” Pete Early slogged over to Helen, as I reached through the mud to unlatch the band tying the donkey to the concrete block.
The third man laughed, a hyena-like sound. “Good luck getting her on that trailer.”
I ignored him. In my peripheral vision, I saw Pete Early sign Helen’s form. He turned to his friends, “One of you f*cknuts get over here and sign this.”
“I ain’t putting my name on nothing,” Hyena Man said.
They began to argue. I worked on the choke chain—a dog’s choke chain!—and managed to get it over her ears and down her nose. I let it drop in the mud, where it disappeared.
“You wanna leave this place, old girl?” I whispered. I gave her another apple slice and tugged on her halter. Those ears flipped up, something Muppet-like that made me smile, even in these circumstances. I stepped away and held out another piece of apple.
“What did I tell you?” Hyena Man said.
“The only way to get her to do anything is to smack her,” Tattoo said. He got off his four-wheeler and walked to the fencerow, presumably to get a stick from a fallen tree.
The donkey watched him, saw his intent, and began trudging through the mire. I never had to touch her halter again, so willing was she to follow me.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Tattoo said. He held a wicked-looking stick as wide as my forearm.
The donkey walked right into the trailer. I’d forgotten to put in fresh hay, but she couldn’t care less. She knew an exit when she saw one.
As I put up the trailer door, the sheriff’s car pulled in, followed by another cruiser.
Sheriff Stan Metz got out and called, “Everything all right, ladies?”
“Oh, yes,” Helen said, so sugary it was hard to keep a straight face. “Mr. Early has signed over possession of the donkey quite willingly.”
I wiped my hands on my mud-spattered jeans and said, “We just need a sweep of the property to see the conditions of the other animals.”
“Whoa. Hey,” Mr. Early said, going pale. “I told you, I don’t have any other animals.”
“Actually, sir, that’s not what you told me. You said, ‘So what if I did?’ ”
He looked like he’d like to take a baseball bat to me.
The sheriff said, “Let’s take a quick look around. We’ll be out of your way in no time. Gentlemen, come with me.” He and another officer walked toward the back of the house.
“I don’t even live here,” Hyena Man said. “I’ve got to go.”
Another officer blocked Hyena Man’s exit. Tattoo looked like he might run into the woods.
When a third cruiser parked on the road, I knew this was no routine animal removal.
An officer told us to go ahead and get into my truck. “What’s going on?” I asked Helen.
“When I gave Stan the address, he said he’d been waiting for a reason to get on this property.”
“What do you think? Drugs?”
Apparently. After about ten minutes, the sheriff leaned into my truck window. “You did that donkey and me a huge favor today. Go on and get out of here before the news trucks arrive.” He winked and slapped my truck door.
WHEN THE DONKEY WALKED OFF THE TRAILER AT MY FARM, she raised those hand-puppet ears and heaved a sigh that sounded like relief.
Both Biscuit and Moonshot came to their paddock fences to whinny at this newcomer. The donkey brayed—a sound like brakes squealing before an inevitable crash.
Biscuit, although he was five times the donkey’s size, trembled.
Moonshot stood, eyes wide, ears forward, every inch of him asking, What the hell was that?
Muriel poked her head around a corner of the barn.
The donkey brayed again, and they all bolted.
We gave the donkey some grass hay. She stood eating as Helen and I sat on upside-down buckets on either side of her (she was so short!). We gently curried the mud from her coarse, uneven coat, uncovering the black stripes of fur that intersected at her withers, draping a cross down her shoulders and along her spine. She had several swollen places but nothing I thought warranted an X-ray. I looked in her eyes and in those miraculous ears—fluffy white inside, lined and tipped with black. Her thick brow tapered into a muzzle that eventually went white, with a perfect heart of black velvet tipping her nostrils and extending its point to her top lip.
I washed the cut over the donkey’s right eye—a cut that could’ve used some stitches—then fetched a stethoscope and listened to her heart. Sound and fit.
I felt the donkey’s belly. What was up with those skinny ribs but this big tummy? I couldn’t imagine that Pete Early would have been very diligent about worming, but it didn’t look like a worm belly.
I filled Helen in on the Zuzu trauma the day before.
Helen’s eyes were bright. As she listened, she pushed her tongue into that gap between her teeth. “So you think Zayna’s leaving him?”
“Yep.” I moved my stethoscope to listen to the donkey’s belly.
“Are you going to tell him?” Helen asked.
“Not my place. Not my problem.”
Healthy gut sounds, all good . . . and something odd—a sensation that pushed my stethoscope away. The donkey lost patience with me and stepped sideways, pushing me off my bucket. I laughed and got up, brushing straw off my butt.
“I thought I’d feel gleeful.” I situated the donkey again. “I wanted her to break his heart. But honestly? It feels sort of pitiful.”
I leaned over, laying hands on the donkey’s belly. There . . . no . . . there it was. A nudge against my open palm. I gasped. “It kicked me!”
Helen looked confused. “The donkey kicked you? When?”
“No,” I said. “Her baby did.”
Helen’s mouth made a pleased, surprised O. “She’s pregnant?”
There it was again, as unmistakable as Gabby’s own kicks inside my belly once upon a time. “She is.”
The donkey folded her knees and lay down with a soft grunt. Even with us standing there, she stretched out on her side. Helen crooned, “No wonder you’re tired. Poor thing.”
We both sat down in the straw and watched her. “A baby miniature donkey,” I said. “I’ve never handled one of those before!”
Helen cocked her head at me. “I imagine there’s not much you can’t handle, my friend.”
I liked that thought, but then Moonshot whinnied outside. The month was about up. Ms. Porn Star would be coming for him soon.